The 2010 holiday game schedule opens up this year with Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. Activision and developer Beenox decide to go back to the drawing board and rather radically alter how Spider-Man games are made.
Here, we have 4 alternate Marvel Universes collide together as you control Amazing, Ultimate, 2099, and Noir versions of Spider-Man. I had barely heard of the 2099 universe and never heard of Noir, so this does introduce people to more of the Marvel library. I half expected Zombie Spider-Man, but no dice.
The different versions have differing core gameplay types. Noir features you falling a lot, Ultimate is more straight combat, Amazing is web swinging, and Noir is stealth. While none hit their style out of the park, the change in play from area to area freshens up an experience that is pretty high on the repetitive scale.
And, yes, the game is repetitive. The Spider-Man titles have always been repetitive, but this is repetitive in new ways. Not interesting ways...but definitely in new ones.
The game does a solid job of making each version of Spider-Man feel different. That is no small feat. They use different voice actors for each, which is a nice touch. Necessary since Peter Parker, apparently, isn't all of these assorted Spider-Men. I don't know my Marvel canon that well apparently.
But the game doesn't work nearly as well as it should.
First off, they dumped the open world aspect. For all of the flaws of the last game (Web of Shadows), its open world aspect was not one of them. The fun of swinging through NYC has been replaced with swinging through smaller environments. It wouldn't be as bad if they fixed the issues of bad cameras, tedious combat, and a lack of things to do...but they didn't. Fighting is still dull. If you're wall crawling then the camera has a blood vendetta against you, and objectives are still pointless. You will have to save civilians constantly and then have battles with cannon fodder before facing bosses with a mix of pattern recognition and bad first person melee.
The stealth areas of Spider-Man Noir are boring and have a rather extreme difficulty ramp. The first two are easy...but the last one was such a pain I had to drop to easy to beat it. Triggering takedowns seemed really haphazard as it seemed really random when you could or could not take somebody down. And the final boss couldn't have ripped off the fight against Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum more than it does without paying royalties.
Its not this game is bad...its that its bad in ways it shouldn't be. With varied gameplay styles, it should never be repetitive, yet it is. They've had web swinging so right for so many titles that the lack of any sense of speed here is baffling. I hoped I'd love this game...but I was disappointed.
